Community Action Model: Creating Change by Building Community Capacity

No discussion of improving people’s health and well-being can be made without looking at health and social inequities in the context of the systems and policies that create them. No solution to dismantle these inequities can be made without the full involvement and leadership of those communities impacted most by the social and economic injustice that these promote. Tobacco control efforts have moved away from projects that focus solely on changing individual behavior (helping smokers quit or educating teens not to start) to projects that mobilize community members and agencies to change environmental factors through community engaged policy development initiatives.

For more than two decades, the Tobacco Free Project has successfully funded community based organizations to implement the Community Action Model (CAM) to address a variety of environmental factors. The CAM creates change by building community capacity through a five step policy development process that has resulted in many innovative and exciting policies.